Desi brings science to 'swades'

PUNE: There''s an uncanny parallel between the new Shah Rukh Khan movie Swades (Motherland) and the Pune-based Vidnyan Vahini (VV) voluntary group.
While, in Swades, Shah Rukh quits a job with Nasa, US, and returns to India to solve its rural problems, Madhukar Deshpande, the founder of VV, also returned from the US and began popularising science among rural children in Maharashtra.
Like Shah Rukh''s character, Deshpande and his 25 volunteers travel in a designer caravan. But the similarities end here. Unlike Shah Rukh, Deshpande is not known to break into song and dance. He is a serious man, who, after a full 30-year career as a university maths professor in Milwaukee, US, settled his children and then returned to Pune in 1994 with his wife Pushpa.
Throughout the years, he had been in touch with the social reality of India through socially-minded friends and activists like Baba Amte and Medha Patkar.
He sensed two things: 1) rural schools sorely lack science labs and therefore, students dread science, 2) interest in science is the key to many problems.
On returning to India, the Deshpandes, with a little bit of help from a Canadian aid agency, built a mobile science laboratory (MSL) inside a bus, complete with TV, video and school lab equipment, books, a generator and a toilet block.
After three years, he put out an appeal for aid and formed a corpus fund. Like-minded friends from the US and India donated funds generously (more from India than the US) and soon, VV became self-sustaining.
VV volunteers have grown from a handful to 25, mostly comprising retired folks, who like to work among schoolchildren.
Together, they have travelled across 85,000 km and covered 750 remote rural schools across Maharashtra. The entire service is free of charge. One of the volunteers, who turned 75 recently, described the secret of his health thus: "My wife''s cooking keeps me healthy and my tonic is working among children, thanks to VV."
VV senior citizens are itching to do more. A permanent rural science centre is being constructed at Andoor, closer to Deshpande''s native town of Gulbarga.
The Tatas have gifted them another mobile bus and CNN has made a documentary on them. Eight other groups in Maharashtra and outside have taken inspiration from them. In spite of the kudos, they feel a lot is still to be done in swades.